Aussie characters as colorful as the landscape

By Tom Huth

updated 9:07 a.m. ET March 5, 2008

Why does Australia's lonely red heart keep bringing me back like a dog to an old shoe?

Here we go again, loading the cooler with provisions in a supermarket parking lot in the spent-out mining town of Broken Hill. Excitement reigns: Good-bye life as we know it! We are heading out — the landscape photographers Len Jenshel and Diane Cook, the Aussie guide Mike Keighley, and I — on a four-wheel-drive adventure to that parallel universe known as the Outback, and we're stocking up because once the pavement runs out, the only lunch spot we're going to find is some dry riverbed.

We linger in the ghost town of Silverton, the end-of-the-world backdrop for Mel Gibson's “Road Warrior” heroics. The old sandstone buildings, crumbling gracefully under the merciless blue sky, are now inhabited by artists who like to paint tripped-out emus on junked Volkswagens. But even such batty license (it's par for the course in the Outback) can't keep us from hitting the road. And soon enough we're watching real emus strut their stuff — prancing ahead as if to taunt us, then hustling away, waggling their big feathered butts.

We modern, sensitized, pre-apocalyptic road warriors are driven not by any Mad Maxian fury but by a frolicsome cross-cultural curiosity. We are out to make contact with those odd-duck Australians who've been suckered away from the lush coastal plains to serve out their sentences on the driest, flattest, least populated hellscape on earth. My rule of thumb? The bleaker the stage, the bolder the characters.

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel Painting emus on Volkswagens is a hobby of Silverton's 50 residents.

The Outback covers practically all of Australia. Imagine a waste area, a sand trap, stretching from Scranton to San Bernadino. After three previous crossings, though, I know that it's far from a featureless void. Along the dirt road to Tibooburra, the land is hillocked at first and speckled by mint-green saltbush, with the Flinders Ranges wrinkling the horizon. Later, witchy-fingered trees appear in the desert's creases, with gums standing taller in the sandy creek beds. A system of fair-weather clouds trundles across the sky. Then the land turns naked and stony.

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel Silverton's arid landscape is a favorite Outback movie location.

Wherever you look, no one is home. Tire tracks lead away to an unseen cattle station, a castaway fridge serving as the mailbox. There is nothing that resembles a fence line. Every hour or so, we make out the dust plume of another car approaching. Ten minutes later we pass it, and Mike, at the wheel, lifts one finger in greeting.

It's 100 degrees, the first day of autumn, when we pull over for lunch. Like the jolly swagman in “Waltzing Matilda,” we settle under the shade of a coolibah tree, and our guide tells the story behind Australia's melancholy anthem. The swagman is a heartbroken traveling handyman who is hunted down for killing a landowner's goat and drowns rather than surrender to the authorities. “It's about our underdog mentality,” Mike reckons. “It goes back to our convict days.” So that Aussie swagger is a smoke screen? “We have a tall-poppy syndrome,” he says. “Achievers get cut down to size. When Russell Crowe comes home, he goes back to the pubs. ‘I'm one of you!’ he's telling them.”

Scratch an Aussie: He'll take the simple pleasures. Our picnic table is a slab of tree bark. A wedge-tailed eagle provides the air show. Mike banters, “Who's got the Vegemite?” A kangaroo spies on us, then bounds away.

Planet Australia. We've just begun this journey and yet already we have arrived, like moths to the flame.

The trip started in high style. We three Americans flew into Adelaide and drove up through the Clare Valley to a 106-year-old pastoral homestead, North Bundaleer. What a fine refuge after a long flight — a gabled, nine-chimneyed, iron-roofed manor house on 400 acres of bush at the Outback's edge. A stained-glass foyer leads to a ballroom with hand-painted-relief wallpaper and a grand piano. The dining room has an Irish Georgian table where the hosts eat with their guests. The library has Kipling and Byron under glass, with a Jack Russell dozing in the late-day sun.

The benevolent, bushy-browed owner, Malcolm Booth, suggested, “We can ruck up for drinks anytime we want.” Forthwith he poured a Clare Valley cabernet malbec from the open bar, and we ambled out to the veranda. He told us the innkeeper's tale: how he and his wife, Marianne, were management consultants looking to escape from Sydney when they found this relic eight years ago, deserted by all but the birds and the sheep. As he detailed the renovation, we watched parrots chasing from treetop to treetop while the sun set over his fragrant estate. Here was one dream fully satisfied — for Malcolm and, so briefly, for all of us.

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel Twelve monoliths were created for Broken Hill by invited artists in 1993.

The next day we took our last paved highway — to Broken Hill, where we enjoyed one more night of high-end lodging at the Royal Exchange, a restored Art Deco hotel. Broken Hill sports a few majestic buildings from its 19th-century silver-rush days and is otherwise a plain-Jane country town, the sidewalks canopied against the sun, the streets named Beryl and Cobalt, Sulphide and Chloride. After the mining went bust, artists started moving here for the good light and the simple housing. Now a refigured Broken Hill boasts 34 galleries and an international sculpture park.

We were smitten by the folk art that distinguishes a cheap hotel called Mario's Palace. Italian immigrant Mario Celotto bought the place in 1973 and, lying on scaffolding and copying from a postcard, painted Botticelli's “Birth of Venus” on the two-story lobby ceiling. An Aboriginal mate of Mario's later covered every wall of the sprawling barroom with murals of an Outback that gushed with mighty rivers, lakes, and waterfalls — a vision of the inland sea Australians have always fantasized about. Mario's son Marat, who now runs the hotel, showed us around, recalling why the place looked so familiar. It was a prime location for “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

MORE FROM DOWN UNDER & BEYOND

Down Under & Beyond Section Front

New Zealand: From Maori culture to Zorbing Top Australian travel experiences Sydney's best on a budget British man begins Australian island dream job Best hotels of Australia and the South Pacific Iconic Sydney pie van celebrates 70 years A journey across Down Under Sexy beaches Down Under Stuck in Tibooburra with the Birdsville blues again Swanky vacation spots Down Under Down Under & Beyond Section Front   Add Down Under & Beyond headlines to your news reader: